By Study and Faith – Episode 6: Cognitive Biases

09/04/23 • 33 min

by Zachary Wright

Introduction

Someone I know, who is a very vocal LGBTQ+ advocate, once got into an argument with me about concepts behind gender. I did everything I could to understand where they were coming from, seeing as this is a complex topic with differing perspectives. However, they were trying to convince me (among other things) that gender is a social construct. Having studied the issue, I pushed against their ideas, arguing that gender is more complicated than that and it certainly isn’t a mere social construct. However, despite my best efforts, my research and perspectives fell on deaf ears. Instead, my friend seemed to cling to the ideas of the people she agreed with. I’ll be sure to go over LGBTQ+ perspectives another day. However, my purpose in telling this story is to show an example of what researchers and psychologists call cognitive bias, which we’ll discuss today.

A few episodes ago, I explained logical fallacies – errors during logical reasoning – that can lead to incorrect conclusions. Today, we’ll be talking about the equivalent of that, but in regards to psychological bias that we sometimes employ. Cognitive biases are “errors in thinking that affect people’s decision-making in virtually every situation” (1). Unlike logical fallacies, cognitive biases are negative brain processes (usually coming from intuition) that can affect our thoughts and lead us to wrong conclusions. In other words, logical fallacies relate to arguments in the way that cognitive biases relate to intuitive brain processes. Critical thinkers must recognize cognitive biases in their thinking in order to more objectively analyze the data they interact with and make more informed decisions. Today, we’ll be going over where cognitive biases come from, explore some examples of cognitive biases, and then explore some principles that can help us avoid them. Let’s take a look.

Heuristics: The Brain’s “Easy Way Out”

Before we explore examples of cognitive biases, we must first understand where they come from. Most documented cognitive biases come from “mental shortcuts” in our minds. Psychologists call these shortcuts “heuristics.” One group of researchers described heuristics in the following way:

A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental effort. While heuristics can reduce the burden of decision-making and free up limited cognitive resources, they can also be costly when they lead individuals to miss critical information or act on unjust biases. (2)

Heuristics help us make decisions and arrive at conclusions easily and quickly. Heuristics take information that seems familiar and draws a connection to something we’ve observed in the past. These shortcuts often lead to good results... except when they don’t.

How heuristics can sometimes be misleading can be shown in some basic examples. For instance, consider this video below:

If you’re like me, you initially see a series of dots moving around in a circle. However, that’s not REALLY what’s going on. It’s a series of points lighting up and growing dimmer in a specific pattern. Our brains provide the illusion that it’s a circular-moving line of dots. This example is one of many optical illusions that employ heuristics (3). Another example of a heuristic is the “inattentional blindness” phenomenon. Here’s another video example of a cognitive bias stemming from a heuristic (4).

In both instances, our brains are either making connections based on information that isn’t present or ignoring information that is present. The accepted psychological theory states these intuitive (and I use that term very deliberately in light of my previous article) heuristics came from evolutionary processes and natural selection (5). In other words, we’ve inherited instincts from our ancestors that protected us, enhancing our chances of survival. This detail will be important later.

It almost goes without saying that this power of heuristics is nothing short of incredible, and one thing that I do want to stress here is that pattern recognition isn’t a bad thing. I’ll be discussing how drawing inappropriate patterns can lead us to jump to conclusions, but not all heuristically-based decisions are bad ones. One pair of researchers noted that “for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical (after the fact) rather than an a priori (before the fact) issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world” (6, parentheses added). In other words, we often don’t know how well our heuristically-based decisions worked until after the fact. However, they sometimes have unintended consequences that can cause problems in our thinking, as we’...

by Zachary Wright

Introduction

Heuristics: The Brain’s “Easy Way Out”

How heuristics can sometimes be misleading can be shown in some basic examples. For instance, consider this video below:

Previous Episode

Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 1 Corinthians 8–13

Evangelical Questions: Men and Women

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the interdependence of women and men. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

In a past episode, we talked about the role of women in both groups -there are some similarities and some significant differences. So I don’t want to rehash that part. But what I want to talk about has more to do with the way both groups see the interdependence of men and women. We’ll use 1 Cor 11:11 as our jumping-off point:

Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.

I’ll start by saying neither group denies this verse. You’d be very hard-pressed to find an Evangelical who is going to write off any of Paul’s words and Latter-day Saints certainly embrace this idea as well. The difference is in how each group plays this out. And really, the short summary of that, is that Latter-day Saints generally think in a more communal mind-set than Evangelicals do. Let me give you an easy example.

I like to listen to audiobooks while I’m doing things around the house and lately I’ve been kind of obsessed with books on the history of the Western states, especially as it comes to water issues. So I’ve been listening to a classic in that genre called, “Cadelic Desert.” The early part of this book is about the history of the irrigation system in the West and the author is explaining the challenges and extraordinary effort required to bring water to the right places. The thing that caught my attention is that as he goes through this though is that he says, in many different ways, the “Mormons” figured out irrigation systems early on because they were a tight-knit society where the communal good could be more easily be put ahead of the individual good. Now, that doesn’t always work out, and certainly worked out easier in the 1910’s and 1920’s that this author was referring to.

So today what I want to talk about is some of the factors that cause Evangelicals to think about the individual and the community slightly differently than Latter-day Saints do. And then we’ll apply those thoughts to the concept of how gender roles play out differently for each.

We’ll start with some history. The Evangelicals are really influenced here by their desire to react against the Methodists. When the Evangelical movement begins – think early Billy Grayham, 1960’s – the largest player in the Protestant world in the United States are the Methodists. Today you can find Methodist churches all across the spectrum from very conservative to extremely liberal. But back then, Methodism mostly meant, “Your grandmother’s church.” There’s a lot of cultural upheaval at this time, rules in society are changing, and the early Evangelicals want to attend churches that feel like they’re keeping up with the times. In some ways, the early Evangelicals are in “reactionary identity” – meaning that they’re doing what teenagers sometimes do: first decide what they don’t want to be, and usually it’s, “I don’t want to be like my parents.” In their early days, Evangelicals were in this reactionary-identity mode of, “I don’t know what I am yet, but I’m not a fuddy-duddy grandma church.” So their initial starting place is: We want to be opposite of what is currently happening.

And really, they start with the most basic question: How does one enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ? For a very long time, the answer is: Well, not the way my parents did it. And how their parents did it, in the Methodist churches of that time, was infant baptism. Now, Methodists don’t conceptualize infant baptism the same as Catholics do, and I don’t want to get into the weeds of what that’s all about, but suffice it to say that the early Evangelicals were very clear on not wanting anything that seemed too old-fashioned, so they reject the Methodist practice. But every movement, especially a brand new one, needs allies and mentors, and the early Evangelicals found that support in the Southern Baptists. Why are they called “Baptists”? Because they believe in credobaptism, which basically means the individual person should be old enough to make a decision about baptism on their own. The opposite of that is pedobaptism, which is the fancy word for “infant baptism.” So it’s not even that the early Evangelicals were theologically set on credobaptism, they just knew they didn’t want pedobaptism. But...

Next Episode

Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 1 Corinthians 14–16

Evangelical Questions: Baptism for the Dead (Part 2)

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about baptism for the dead. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

Since we talk about Come Follow Me stuff on this channel I do want to make you aware of a new resource for next year. Dr. Grant Hardy has a new book, The Annotated Book of Mormon. And it is delicious. It’s much closer to a study Bible, but with the Book of Mormon, than I’ve seen before. It includes the entire text of the BoM but has Hardy’s notes embedded on the same page – at least in the physical book. There is a Kindle edition, but it makes the book much harder to use because you have to click about 4 times to actually see the footnotes and get back to your page. The notes are the whole point of this book. And you can just access those much easier in the physical form. I teach Gospel Doctrine in my ward and picked this up to help me prepare for next year. It’s very good.

One other resources you should know about that is coming up. FAIR is hosting an online-only conference specifically focused on just the Book of Mormon. Richard Bushman will be presenting along with many others. Details are available here.

Okay, We talked about baptism for the dead on a past episode in a more general way, but today we’ll get down to some specifics of why this one bothers Evangelicals so much. We’ll use 1 Cor 15:29-32 as our jumping-off point:

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

So, Evangelicals have an interesting dilemma with this verse about baptism for the dead. Evangelicals generally have a view of the Bible called inerrancy – this means that they see the Bible as being free from error. So, here they have a verse talking about baptism for the dead, they believe the Bible is without error, but they won’t accept the idea of baptism for the dead. But they have to figure out some way to explain this verse. I’m going to lay out the most popular arguments for you as best as I can.

One way they deal with this is to basically say, “Who knows?” One Evangelical leader says it this way, “The phrase ‘baptism for the dead’ is so obscure and perplexing, the meaning so uncertain, and the variety of interpretations so numerous that it seems wise to say it seems impossible to know what the phrase means.” And in one sense, that’s a fair answer – if you don’t know what something means you should say so.

A slightly more sophisticated explanation goes like this: The baptism Paul is using “dead” here in a metaphorical sense. He’s not talking about actual dead people, but rather those who are “dead in sin.” Baptism for the dead is then re-cast as just regular baptism. Another possible option that they put on the table is really a rather odd one, and you have to torture the sentence structure a bit to make it work. But this argument says that “baptism for the dead” actually means “baptism because of the dead.” The idea being that those who had already died had strong testimonies and they were still inspiring currently alive people to get baptized themselves. It doesn’t really work in the structure of the argument, but it’s one of the ways they talk about this. A slight variation on this is that Paul is talking about the martyrs who bravely faced death in the 1st century and were inspiring others to be faithful to Christ.

A slightly less tortured explanation says that the dead who were being baptized for had already decided to trust in Christ, they had just not been baptized yet. So after they die, their friends or family symbolically get baptized for them – but it’s more like a family member finishing a mountain hike on behalf of a loved one who died while trying to complete that hike. Everyone...